Deciding what to write about today became very easy last night. There’s a big fire burning in the mountains over Santa Barbara. When I drove home from work yesterday, everything was pretty much normal. A little less than 2 hours later, I left home for my softball game and something seemed a bit off. I couldn’t figure out what it was until I got on the highway towards the game, and then saw the fire in the mountains in front of me.

I wasn’t the only one twittering about it. Twist is a website that will graph word usage on twitter, and track trends:

Got to the softball field, and unsurprisingly, the game was being postponed. Drove like a maniac home to get my camera, and then back towards downtown Santa Barbara to do some shooting. Taking pictures of a fire at night is hard. Even harder when you’re not really terribly close to it, though I suppose it’s a lot safer that way. Getting the exposures right is tricky. I got a few good shots.

About 10 minutes after I took this one, a police car drove by and announced that the area I was in was being evacuated. I wasn’t all that close to the fire, and didn’t feel like I was in any danger. I moved only about three blocks away, and stayed there for the next several hours.

The white line in there is a helicopter coming in for more water. This one was taken from the top of a parking garage. There were at least 5 other people up there with tripods and cameras doing the same thing.

You can see the rest in the flickr set: Tea Fire. I may go shoot more tonight.